Bricklayer by day, Level 35 Battle-mage by night, Eddie Kilroy lives to play Realm of Battle as Killum, escaping the tedium of his job. Learning of a secret dungeon hidden in a vast swamp, Killum and his friends charge off to challenge it. After a grueling running battle with goblins, orcs, barbarians, and other fell creatures, they win through to the end. Only no treasure awaits the victors. Instead, they find an ordinary altar, but one which asks if they want to enter the Hidden Realms. Duh. Of course they do! Who doesn’t want to level up in the Game?

Big mistake. They can see no way back, no way to log out. Now, trapped in the Game, they face higher and more dreadful consequences – and all that with no certainty that they might ever return.

My Opinion: 434 pages, $2.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited

The novel starts with a group of players in a game and stays there the entire novel. No real life story line here.

This is basically a trapped in the game dungeon crawl story with some good group banter thrown in.

The first 12% is character development for the five main characters and a dungeon dive that gets them all trapped in another level of the game permanently.

From 12 - 32%, the group is split up and have little small adventurers that inform them about the kind of hard knock world they’re stuck in. Then they eventually meet up again by 33% mark and then they all go look for a way back home while killing monsters, getting levels, and collecting loot.

The game mechanics in the story are there from the very first page. Levels, Player Killer count, alignment, item descriptions, etc. While these mechanics exists, they don’t always make sense and aren’t always consistent.

Sometimes game logic is even thrown out entirely. The most egregious examples revolve around combat. The group gets trapped and their levels are set back to level 10. Yet, each character seem to have the miraculous ability to one shot kill opponents 10-15 levels higher than themselves. There are other smaller inconsistencies like no explained XP system and instances where characters level up after each fight or even just from buying and selling goods. But the game mechanics are there throughout the story so it is LitRPG.

There are a couple of reviews that claim the story has a unique magic system but I found it to be the exact opposite. Magic is learned from bought or found spell scrolls. The exact same as it is in most RPG games.

Overall, it’s not a bad story. The inconsistencies in the story and the simplistic and unrealistic combat were drawbacks. Still, not a bad story, it just doesn’t have anything that wows me either.